The knock on the door of Odette’s apartment in Nice came at 6 A.M. When she opened it, Odette was already dressed, ready to leave for work. An agent of the French Milice pushed his way in. “We have information on you,” he told Odette. “I have to bring you to the Germans right away.”1
“He began to search me,” Odette said. “I didn’t try to resist.” Then he began to search her apartment in a move that could have doomed the Marcel Network. Moussa used Odette’s place as a mail drop and had hidden some incriminating papers there. Had they been found, he too would have ended up in Nazi hands. Fortunately for Moussa, the Milice agent paid little attention to Odette while looking around.
“I told him that I had to take care of something, and he let me leave the room,” Odette explained. “He was very stupid.” Two other members of the Milice stood guard outside the door, eliminating any chance that she could flee. But Odette had some room to maneuver, a few moments alone in the bathroom during the search, and managed to destroy the papers that Moussa had left behind. The police found no trace of Moussa, away at the time collecting funds from Maurice Brener in Paris. For the moment, anyway, Moussa remained in the clear.
Odette, however, had to worry about much more than her own fate. The one document the Milice did find in their search was a potential time bomb—the letter identifying Sylvie Delattre as a social worker employed by the bishop of Nice. Odette knew the Germans would certainly question her on any link to Paul Rémond. If they forced her to talk, she might endanger the bishop and the hidden children.
The Milice turned Odette over to the Germans at the Hotel Excelsior, which the Gestapo had converted into a makeshift prison. “Of course, I was slapped and pushed around a bit,” Odette said. “But there was no torture.”
The next stop was the basement in the Hotel Hermitage, for what Odette called “a much more muscular interrogation.” In later years, she never described what “muscular” meant, not in any interview, not to any friend, not even in the book she wrote. She did say, however, that, “They threatened to shoot me.”
Odette was ready for torture, ready to die before implicating Moussa and the bishop and endangering the children. She fully expected torture, perhaps to her death, as friends of hers had died at the Hermitage. The friends had been interrogated in the basement, and then locked in hotel rooms on the upper floors between questioning sessions. “They threw themselves out of windows in order not to talk, or perhaps because they were suffering too much,” Odette said. Above all she feared the Germans would inject her with truth serum and force her to talk when she would be too drugged to resist.2
Almost certainly the Germans beat her, but apparently never applied either extreme measures of torture or truth serum. Her interrogators simply did not know who they had at their mercy. They thought Odette was just another Jewish woman in hiding. They never asked about the Marcel Network because they didn’t know her role in it. Odette herself helped keep them in the dark by telling a story that limited the damage.
Under the “muscular” interrogation, Odette volunteered that she was not Sylvie Delattre. She gave them her real name of Odette Rosenstock, admitting she was Jewish, thereby raising her credibility in German eyes. Then she simply lied. Odette said she had given Bishop Rémond the false name of Sylvie Delattre so she could get the job as a social worker. No one would have employed her with a Jewish name. The Germans bought her explanation. They did not pursue further Odette’s link with Rémond.3
The Germans also tried the good cop/bad cop tactic with her. They took her from the basement interrogation, shivering with cold, and delivered her upstairs to a higher-ranking woman officer. The officer gave Odette a cigarette and said, “I admire you,” referring to the way she had withstood the beatings. “I could not have done what you have done.” Then she added: “I promise that if you give us a few names of other Jews we will let you go, take you to Switzerland, and that will be the end of your nightmare.”
“If you were in my place,” Odette replied, “would you talk?”4 The woman turned her head aside, mumbling something about “damned intellectuals” before she had Odette taken away. On May 2, 1944, a week after her arrest, Odette was shipped off to Drancy, en route to Auschwitz.
In the end, what saved her from extreme torture was essentially German bureaucratic incompetence. Two Gestapo agents had been on Odette’s trail, deliberately not arresting her, hoping that she would lead them to the network that they heard was sheltering Jews. But they had not yet briefed others in the Gestapo office in Nice on their tracking operation. In short, the right hand of the Gestapo didn’t know what the left hand was doing. The two agents tracking Odette just happened to be on a mission to Paris when Odette was arrested in Nice and could not participate in her interrogation at the Hotel Hermitage. The Germans who did question Odette never knew what to ask.
When the two tracking agents returned to Nice, the Gestapo finally pieced together the truth. They discovered the mistake of having let Odette go on to Drancy without a maximum interrogation. Belatedly they tried to put things right. On May 16, two weeks after Odette’s departure from Nice, according to documents uncovered after the war, the Gestapo chief in Nice, a certain Dr. Keil, sent a telegram to the commandant of the internment camp at Drancy demanding that “the Jewess Rosenstock” be held there for further questioning. Drancy replied that Odette “was evacuated to the East before your telegram arrived” and could not be interrogated further.5 For the time being, anyway, Moussa, the bishop, and the children they hid were all safe. Odette, however, was on her way to hell.
Odette’s last night at Drancy ended at 5 A.M. when she and others were ordered to assemble in the large central courtyard. There were 1,200 men, women, and children in her group, all chosen to be deported. “None of us really knew then what deportation meant,” Odette recalled. But by her arrest in 1944 Jews knew enough to fear the worst. “We had heard on English radio the horror stories of two or three escapees from death camps,” Odette said. “They spoke of entire trainloads gassed on arrival. Reason made it hard to admit that such things were possible, but at the same time we knew that there had to be some truth in all that.”6
By 7 A.M. the deportees were seated in buses on the way to the nearby train station at Bobigny. They passed a working-class district where ordinary people went about their usual early morning business, buying milk and bread or heading for their jobs. Odette watched them through the window of the bus, thinking she might never again enjoy such simple, everyday pleasures. Nobody on the street, she noted, paid any attention to the poor creatures in the buses. Odette thought about the deportees trying to be courageous, and compared them to the people outside not wanting to know. She could no longer hold back her tears.
At the railroad station Odette was herded onto a cattle car with sixty other people. Hay covered the floor. A single bucket served as the only toilet. The Germans ordered Odette, as a medical doctor, to supervise the sanitary arrangements and the organization of the people in the car, an almost impossible task in such crowded and primitive conditions. She arranged for a blanket to be hung around the bucket for a modicum of privacy, had the suitcases piled in one place, tried to comfort the children, and attempted to allot everyone a minimum of space to lie on the hay. “You had to be diplomatic,” she remembered. “People used to being free didn’t take kindly to orders from a stranger.” Then the doors clanged shut, producing total night inside the cattle car, and little air. The train lurched forward. “The cards were dealt,” Odette said. “There was no more hope.”
The trip to Auschwitz took three days and three nights. A second bucket provided drinking water for everyone in the car. It was refilled once a day at station stops, when the toilet bucket got emptied at the same time. There was no food, no medicine for those who fell ill. People sitting or lying down fought over floor space for their legs. When the train moved, the car shook badly, throwing deportees against each other. Heading to the makeshift toilet meant bumping against other people, setting off more shouting matches and sometimes fights. The stench in the train became unbearable.
Odette’s car included fifteen children, already orphans. Their parents had been deported earlier to Auschwitz and now they were making the same journey. No one could shield the children from the constant talk in the train about gas chambers. But two young women in their twenties, Fanny and Renée, helped Odette to distract the little ones, leading them in singing songs and playing games, laughing and smiling. At night though, Renée huddled against Odette, sobbing.7
On the third night, the train finally arrived at Birkenau, the end of the rail line at Auschwitz. The sprawling extermination camp, which took its name from the Polish town nearby, was divided into three parts. Auschwitz I, the original site, served as the administrative center. It was designed to look like a labor camp. A sign over the entrance, still there, read “Arbeit Mach Frei”—German for “Work Makes One Free.” Most arrivals never got to walk under that sign and into Auschwitz. Instead the vast majority of inmates got herded into Birkenau, also known as Auschwitz II, which contained most of the barracks, and the gas chambers. It was the largest of all the Nazi extermination camps. Some 960,000 Jews perished there. Auschwitz III was the actual labor camp, where inmates worked in an arms factory, in a chemical plant, in mines, or in farm fields.
The barracks at Birkenau were only a short walk from the railhead. Still, deportees arriving with Odette had to wait several hours until dawn in their putrid railway cars before the doors at last opened and German soldiers barking orders threw them off the train. The soldiers moved the prisoners into lines, shouting, blowing whistles, beating the laggards with batons. “Schneller, schneller, los, los,” the Germans screamed. “Faster, faster, go, go!” Everyone was terrified, the children most of all.
German guards quickly confiscated the miserable little suitcases the prisoners had taken on the train. They tossed out the bodies of deportees who had died on the trip. Then they prodded those prisoners too sick or too feeble to walk to get into the back of trucks, with no kindness intended. Those trucks went straight to the gas chambers.
All the other prisoners continued the forced march to the camp; cold, hungry, thirsty, exhausted, and filthy from the long ordeal on the train, and now more frightened than ever. Jewish detainees from the camp, armed with canes to beat the new arrivals, helped the Germans keep them in line. Detainees did all sorts of appalling jobs at the camp—from beating new arrivals to removing dead bodies from the gas chambers and harvesting their gold teeth—as a way to survive themselves. While forced into jobs they hated, some of them tried to do what they could to help the new arrivals. Others became more brutal than the German guards themselves.
As Odette walked along with two children, one at each hand, a detainee pulled her forward, with the curve of his cane wrapped around her neck. “I’m a Greek, a Jew like you,” he told her, speaking rapidly and in a hushed voice. “You must let go of the children if you want to live.” Odette ignored him, tugged tighter on the little hands, and walked on. Other detainees then tore the two children away from her. Odette tried to go back, looking for them, only to be pushed by the detainees toward the front of the line at the entrance to the camp.
Four German officers stood at the large gate leading into the camp, pretending not to have seen the scuffle over Odette as they calmly sorted out the arrivals. “Links” or “Rechts” they would say—left for the women, right for the men—ordering selected prisoners to enter the camp.
A large group of newcomers remained outside the gate. They included children, the elderly, those judged too weak to work, pregnant women, and women who would not let go of children. Had the two children not been pried away from Odette, she too would have joined that group, all of whose members were destined for the gas chambers. Instead she moved unwillingly to the left and entered the camp. She tried to maintain her dignity, walking in as slowly as possible with her head held high, refusing to be intimidated by the Germans. “I am the one who is judging them,” Odette told herself.
About three hundred women from the train, including Odette, filed into the camp, greeted by woman guards armed with leather belts who beat them and shouted “Fünf zu fünf !” Those among the prisoners who understood German told the others they were to form ranks of five by five and march on. The new arrivals were led into a large stone hangar and told to wait.
In the next few minutes an unusual-looking group of women prisoners from the camp entered the building. They appeared vigorous, comfortably dressed, almost elegant. Odette guessed that these women, all young and attractive, had been allowed to live only if they served as whores for the pleasure of the German soldiers running the camp. The whores threw themselves on the new arrivals, demanding in a mixture of Yiddish, German, and bad French that they be given a skirt, or a pair of shoes, a scarf or a ring. They said the newcomers wouldn’t need their clothing or jewelry anymore, and that refusals to hand them over would lead to cruel punishments. But they left as soon as the German women guards entered the hangar.
Each of the new prisoners received a number, recorded on a list next to her name. The number was tattooed on her forearm. Odette became A-5598. Next they were stripped naked and shaved—heads, armpits, and pubic hair. Someone approached Odette to say “tell them you are a doctor and you won’t be shaved.” She did, and as a result, they left an inch of hair on her head. Anyone resisting the shaving got beaten. Women denounced by the whores to the guards for refusing to give away clothing on arrival also got beaten. After the shaving, the new prisoners no longer recognized each other. Odette had trouble finding her friends from the train.
The showers came next. Four women stood under each showerhead. They were ordered to sit down. Then they heard the noise of the ventilation system in the building cranking up. “We all thought the gas was coming,” Odette said. “There was utter panic. But it wasn’t gas, not this time.” The water came on—ice-cold showers.
From the showers, the guards took the women to a room with a long table piled with prison clothes. An inmate would be handed a shapeless dress, spotted and torn; a pair of men’s underpants, more or less patched up; and shoes of haphazard size that never fit—sometimes even two left shoes or two right ones—often without shoelaces.
By then night had fallen, and it had turned cold. They had spent the whole day without food or drink. Now they were pushed into a barn-like building and told to sleep on wide bunks made of wooden planks—ten women to a bunk—with no bedding and no blankets. They lay down as best they could. All ten had to lie on the same side. It was impossible for any one of them to turn over unless the nine others also did so at the same time. But they were all so exhausted that they fell asleep almost immediately. They had survived their first day at Auschwitz, feeling lucky to be alive.8
Odette awoke to sounds of leather belts smacking flesh, cries of pain, and orders to get outside. It was 3 A.M. Stars filled the sky, and, with them, flames from high chimneys seen behind rows of barracks. The crematoria worked at night, burning off the remains of the unfortunates taken to the gas chambers. “Look, over there,” one of the guards said. “That’s the old people and the children from your train.”
Icy wind tore through light clothing. Odette’s teeth chattered. She and the others stood at attention in rows of five by five for over an hour, through an interminable roll call. The guards counted, got the numbers wrong, and counted again. Some prisoners fainted. The guards blamed them for the confused count, beat other prisoners in frustration, and counted yet again.
When the guards were finally satisfied with the count, teams of two women detainees arrived, each carrying a stretcher between them. A large vat sat on the stretcher, filled with a steaming liquid. The detainees nearest Odette poured the liquid into a billy can covered with mud and handed it to the first prisoner in the first rank. “Drink that and pass it on,” the detainee said. “It’s for five.” By the time the tin can got to Odette the so-called coffee was cold and tasted awful. But it was the first “meal” in the five days since the train left Drancy.
After that, they marched five by five to the toilets, a long rectangular building with an entry door on one of the short sides and an exit door on the other. Guards ordered the women into the building one hundred at a time. The smell was overpowering, the noise from chattering women like a huge birdcage gone crazy.
A wooden bench-like structure ran down each long side of the building, each with fifty toilet holes in it. Prisoners had to sit on the holes, barely separated from the woman on the left and the woman on the right, facing the parallel row of women opposite. It is hard to imagine a more demeaning way to answer the call of nature, but here was one of the few places at Auschwitz where prisoners could, however briefly, talk freely before guards ordered them out again. The prisoners dubbed the toilettes “Radio Shithouse,” the place where they could exchange news, real and false. Odette remembered hearing there at least a dozen times that Paris had been liberated and Hitler assassinated.
Later that second day, they finally ate, a greasy soup and a hunk of bread shared by five prisoners. Then they went back to the barn-like building where they had slept the first night, this time for interrogations, questions that would determine the barracks and the job assigned to each new inmate. It was Odette’s turn.
“Last name?”
“Rosenstock.”
“First name?”
“Odette.” The Belgian woman detainee who interrogated Odette in French wrote down “Odette Sarah.”
“But my name is not Sarah,” Odette protested.
“Here all Jews are called Sarah,” she was told. “Besides, your name no longer has any importance. Only your number counts now. Profession?”
The interrogator paused, looking interested. “Maybe you have a chance here,” she said. “But don’t get your hopes up.”9